I just realized that I recently crossed a whopping 400 deviations on Deviantart. That feels like a lot. Now, those 400 are not all images I've ever done, but it's definitely a majority of my output since 2006, when I joined Deviantart. Back then the old Gimp Talk forum was king and Gimp Chat was not yet but a glimmer in GnuTux's eye. I have several recurring characters so I thought I'd make a little retrospective of one of them - the lovable Jester.

The Jester 2006 - 2021


My first DeviantArt image, from back in 2006. Done fully in GIMP, I may even have used a mouse to draw this one. This is the first version of my "Jester" character that originated as a roleplaying character on an online Play-by-post forum I was still on at the time. She had four arms (split by the elbow) and a crazy huge hat. This character came to be developed quite a lot over the years.


A recurring theme of that particular roleplaying forum was that a lot of different fantasy creatures lived together in relative harmony. Another of my characters was the very large, very evil and nihilistic ancient dragon Ebb (also someone I've later come to depict in many images). He was played as the literal opposite personality to the sunny Jester, and a common gag was that the Jester would try to become his friend whether the dragon wanted to or not. In fact, she was so unafraid of the monster that others would regularly question her sanity. This image Dragon meeting Jester, from 2006, portrays one of these interactions.


Jester from 2007, GIMP. At this time I was still using her as a roleplaying character, so many of these early images were inspired by in-game events (in this case an in-game festival).


Back in 2007 I experimented a lot with GIMP animation using Gimp's inbuilt animation system. Forum "sigs" were the big thing at the time (especially on GimpTalk where you had an entire subforum dedicated to making sigs!), and this one acted as my signature for a while.


The four-armed version of the Jester even made it into 2007 year's Christmas Card. This was coincidentally my very first card in a tradition I've continued ever since. This was done with GIMP 2.4.2.


Fast-forward to 2009 and activity at that online play-by-post forum was winding down. This image, Dance my Jester, turned out to be the last image I ever did of the four-armed version of the Jester character. It's ironic that the puppet she's playing with has only two arms - I recall it just looked weird to give it all four when the Jester's own arms were not in-frame to give context.


My image Mask upon Mask from 2009 was originally meant as something else but became the prototype for the next version of the Jester as a more 'normal' human with two arms. At this time I followed GIMP-svn (bleeding edge, compiling from source etc) and I was pretty active in the community around GIMP.


Say Hi to Mrs Buttons from 2010 is the dawn of the more 'modern' look of the Jester. She has varied a bit in style over the years, but the concept of the character and her puppet have remained. This was again inspired by role-playing, this time on an MUD (a multiplayer text-based game) where this (completely non-combat) character was played for several years.


This image, No Frowns in Misery from 2010 is a series depicting the Jester cheerful in otherwise miserable conditions. While one can maybe discuss some anatomical choices here, this is one of my first forays into really depicting rain and wetness.


Jester IN YOUR FACE! was a experiment that detailed the puppet ("Mrs Buttons"). I remember that it was tricky to get the Jester's mouth right - it's so easy to make exposed teeth look fake. This image could maybe have had some more advanced background, but it ended up working very well on T-shirts.


In 2012 I had started experimenting with MyPaint as a complement to GIMP. At this time the GIMP developers had made it clear in their mission statement that GIMP was not (primarily) aimed at image creation but at image manipulation. This made GIMP less relevant to me as a painter since it seemed clear that focus would not be put on improving the painting experience of GIMP. MyPaint on the other hand was a pure paint program but lacked any image-manipulation features. This image, What's yer name? had me use MyPaint for the main painting-work, and GIMP for cropping, image-adjusting and other adjustments.


By 2014 I had moved on to picturing the Jester and the dragon in other stories. Not role-playing-related this time. This image, Dragon meeting Jester III takes up their meeting yet again, but with a grimmer tone as the dragon is in serious trouble here. At this time I had started to experiment with sketching on my Android Table (an Galaxy S3, those have Wacom pens). So the B&W line art for this I made on the tablet, after which I loaded it into the computer and coloured it with MyPaint and GIMP.


In The Curious Look from 2014 I had started testing out Krita, which is a more full-fledged painting program, alleviating the need to combine MyPaint and GIMP. It would nevertheless take many years until Krita was quite at the point where the entire workflow could be done easily. In this image, the Jester took on a distinctly asian appearance, and she has gradually moved more and more in that direction I think.


This sketch from 2016 uses MyPaint's charcoal brushes to mimic drawing on a lined piece of paper. Final adjustments were still done in GIMP. This is another one of my "contrasting personality" crossovers, this time between the ever-cheerful Jester and the grim and silent (and one-legged) "Unknown Girl" from my Where Red Apples Lie series/comic-snippets.


In 2016 I wrote several (unpublished) short stories about the Jester and her world. This image was a scene from that, done in Krita.


This was an excerpt from another of those short stories, from around the same time. I remember that this one took a lot of time.


Krita allowed for a lot of new experimentation, and I used Krita's "sketch brush" a lot in this 2017 image; the brush allows to quickly build large patches of color wish sharp edges in between. The style is quite different from other Jester images - it's one of the few images I've done where her jester's cap is nowhere in the scene so many would not recognize her despite her puppet still being on her right hand.


As I expanded on the stories around the Jester, I experimented with a more 'child-friendly' style. This was a 2018 concept for the opening page of a story.


But I also explored darker themes; in Savoring the Light from 2020, the Jester is thrown in some sort of prison with only her puppet for company. The notion of her beeing cheerful despite hardships are present in many of my images of her.


Which brings us up to the present day. This is No frowns in Misery 3 - Dance in rain from June of 2021. I made this one based on the RAP theme "dancing in the rain". This is again a scene from one of my stories of the Jester and shows her being content despite being cold and wet. This image was done in Krita. Who knows where I take the character in the future, but she's fun to paint so it's probably not the last we've seen of her.

On to another few hundred deviations, I hope! If anyone's interested you can see almost all 400 deviations in my gallery on DeviantArt here: https://www.deviantart.com/griatch-art/gallery
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Griatch

Wow, I love the story behind each paint,
Thanks a lot for sharing this. I just spend a very nice moment seeing Jester and Mrs Buttons evolving during all those years.

Congratulations on the 400 deviations! The Jester is a wonderful character. I'm so glad to have met her here. If she can smile I can at least give it a try myself a bit more often. Thanks so much for putting together and sharing the retrospective.

Tremendous history, tremendous character and so well executed -

Does this mean I now have to think about learning Krita?

Just posting this must have involved such a lot of work.
Thoroughly enjoyed the shared experience and the insight into the development of the Jester character.
In awe - thank you Griatch.

My personal Golden Globes for your spectacular history are for:

- No Frowns in Misery from 2010
- What's yer name? 2012
- The Curious Look from 2014
- 2017
- 2018
- No frowns in Misery 3 - Dance in rain from June of 2021

Congratulations for your 400 Deviations.

It's really fun to see the history of your most iconic character and to see the different approaches you have used over the years. I enjoyed reading this.

Enjoyed everyone when you shared them to Gimp Chat. Couple you shared here are before my time. Has been wonderful to see them. Congratulations and look forward to the next one!

Wow, these are fantastic paintings Griatch! Thank you for sharing. Having seen just the last two before it's interesting to see the Jester's evolution and get some idea of the richness of her story. You are a very talented artist. Are you professionally trained or self taught?

Remembered many of these; all fantastic Griatch.

Very fascinating to follow the evolution of Jester and the different programs explained.
It shows your creativity and versatility. For some time now I've been following your activity on Deviantart.
And here, on Gimp Chat, every year I'm looking forward to your new Christmas card.
You are a true artist, Griatch

They have gone through a lot together!


I think we can all learn to be a little more optimistic at times.

Thanks! Krita has grown to be a quite competent competitor to GIMP in the OSS field. GIMP has more scripting support (and more plugins due to its long history), and Krita has less of a focus on photo-manip (but it does have G'MIC built-in etc). It has far superior select/move/crop tools IMO though. It's a bit of a learning curve when switching though, for sure. I still use GIMP for certain things (especially quick fixes etc).

Thanks! Yeah, it was a bit of work to put this together, but it was a fun trip down memory lane for me too!

Fun to see what your favorites where. I having a hard time rating them myself, they have some sentimental value to me as well, which confuses the issue.


Glad you enjoyed it! I hadn't considered that she'd be 'iconic' in anyone's eyes.


Yeah, you have been around to see many of these when they first came out. Glad you haven't tired of her yet!


It's a lot of background for this one, yes. I'm not professionally trained in the sense that I've studied art or something; I've just been painting in oils since I was a kid, and then gradually switched over to computer-based art as technology became available. I have done some one-off professional works at times, but I'm mostly a happy hobbyist.


I think you may have commented on most of them too. Thanks!


That's high praise, thanks! The Christmas card is a fun tradition!

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Thanks for the nice comments everyone!
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Griatch